The outgoing first lady of the United States is as popular as ever; she was very, very active throughout her husband’s presidency and served the White House in an especially cognizant manner when she maintained its popular garden and promoted the role of veterans re-entering the work force as everyday citizens.
But a shroud of mystery surrounds the incoming first lady, a foreign-born immigrant and one-time supermodel who speaks with an interesting accent and attends exclusive galas in the highest of high fashion.
Her son, Bannon, is 10 years old. And just how Melania Trump’s homemaking atop her husband’s grandiose tower in Manhattan compares to the suburban moms who helped elect her husband, is just as mysterious as anything about her.
More importantly, however, is how she plans to conduct herself as FLOTUS:
She’s displayed no real political ambition
AP Photo
In a September 2015 interview with People, the reclusive Mrs. Trump recalled living in Yugoslavia during the fall of communism in the 1990s and her subsequent careers in fashion and modeling. She described herself in fearless terms, saying, “I’m my own person. I’m not a yes person. So I tell it as it is.”
Melania also revealed that she believes in her role as a mother first, being at home for Barron as the executive of the household is traveling the country on the official business of becoming president — and that’s something Barron apparently looks up to. “He wants to be a golfer, a businessman, a pilot. It’s that age when you introduce him to stuff,” she said to People.
The interview suggests women’s health issues might be important to Melania, but also downplays her public life and promotes her as a very private person — something that multiple other accounts of her life have described in varying terms.
She’ll spearhead the effort to stop online bullying
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Perhaps in spite (or because) of the backlash received over her husband’s frequent Twitter rants and questionable comments about women and minorities, Mrs. Trump has promised the public that she intends to fight the endemic of online bullying that has begun to pervade online forums from Reddit to Facebook.
“It is never OK when a 12-year-old girl or boy is mocked, bullied or attacked,” she has said. “It is terrible when it happens on the playground, and it is absolutely unacceptable when it is done by someone with no name hiding on the internet. We have to find a better way to talk to each other.”
She intends to be a very traditional first lady
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Way back in 2000, Mrs. Trump told the New York Times that if she had the privilege to become FLOTUS, she would be “very traditional – like Betty Ford or Jackie Kennedy.”
Harper’s Bazaar famously did a photo spread and profile of Melania back in January that put on full display her elegance, richness, style and feminine persuasion that does call into memory some of the great first ladies, such as Mrs. Kennedy.
As Vanity Fair revealed, controversy involving her person will be rejected and dealt with in true Trump fashion: Do not disparage Melania Trump, or you will be sued.
Her presence may have unnerved feminists globally rooting on the election of America’s first female president, but Kennedy’s biographer biographer Pamela Keogh says it would perhaps be wiser to watch with keener interest projecting Mrs. Trump as a first lady that is “beautiful, smart and keeps her own counsel.”